Thursday, January 01, 2015

Why sportsmen's autobiographies disappoint.

When Sachin Tendulkar released his autobiography recently, I
knew that at least one person would not be buying or reading it.Me.

While I’ve always considered him an intuitive batting
genius, I’ve never heard him utter an intelligent remark about the game. So,
even if it was going to be ghost-written, I was under no illusion at all that
the book would offer any insight either on how he approached or planned his
innings or any other nuances of the game.

But, given his stature, there was tremendous anticipation
before the release of the book. I am sure it sold well, even if the reviews
were not too favourable.

Why are autobiographies of most geniuses invariably disappointing and
why do we feel the need to read autographies of sportsmen, at all?

In his review of tennis-player Tracy Austin’s autobiography (“Beyond
Centre Court”) David Foster Wallace writes (you can find a pdf version here.)
:

Almost uniformly bad
as books, these athletic “My story”s sell incredibly well; there are so many of
them. And they sell so well because athletic stories seem to promise something
more than the regular old name-dropping celebrity autobiography.

Here is a theory. Top
athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we
revere- fastest, strongest- and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way.
Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even
to define, whereas the best relief pitcher, free-throw shooter or female tennis
player is, at any given time, a matter of public statistical record. Top athletes
fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority
and hard data.

Plus they’re
beautiful. Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstraction
like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable.
To be top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and
angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in
ourselves.

So, we want to know
them. These gifted, driven physical achievers. We too, as audience, are driven:
watching the performance is not enough. We want to go intimate with all that
profundity. We want inside them; we want the Story. We want to hear about
humble roots, privation, precocity, grim resolve, discouragement, persistence,
team spirit, sacrifice, killer instinct, liniment and pain. We want to know how
they did it. What goes through their minds? Is their Agony of Defeat anything
like our little agonies of daily frustration?

So ,the point then
about these sports memoirs’ market appeal: Because top athletes are profound,
because they make a certain type of genius as carnally discernible as it can
ever get, these ghost-written invitations inside their lives and their skulls
are terribly seductive for book buyers. Explicitly or not, the memoirs make a
promise- to let us penetrate the indefinable mystery of what makes some persons
geniuses, semi divine, to share with us the secret and so both to reveal the
difference between us and them and to erase it, a little, that difference …to
give us what we want, expect, only one, the master narrative, the key) Story.

However seductively
they promise, though, these autobiographies never deliver. And “Beyond Centre
Court” is especially bad. The book fails not because it’s poorly written, but
because what any college sophomore knows is the capital crime of expository
prose; it forgets who it’s supposed to be for…. None of the book’s loyalties
are to the reader. The author’s primary allegiance seems to be her family and
friends.

DFW then talks about the air of robotic banality that suffuses
the sports-memoirs genre and how the books turn out to be disappointing and stunningly
inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that fascinate the
readers.

It remains very hard
for me to reconcile the vapidity of Austin’s narrative mind, on the one hand,
with the extraordinary mental powers that are required for world-class tennis,
on the other.

Real indisputable
genius is so impossible to define that maybe we automatically expect people who
are geniuses as athletes to be also geniuses as speakers and writers, to be articulate,
perceptive, truthful, profound.

The real secret behind
top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and
profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of
what just goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the centre of
hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might
be : nothing at all .

It may well be that we
spectators who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the ones truly able to
see, articulate and animate the experience of the gift that we are denied. And
those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be
blind and dumb about it- and not because blindness and dumbness are the price
of the gift, but because they are its essence.

I felt that this, to a large extent, explains why Sachin –
undoubted genius, though he is, when batting- was unable to offer any insights
in his autobiography ( As I admitted, I haven’t read it. I’m going by some of
the reviews I came across).Unfortunately for him, his ghost writer too lacked an understanding of
what to provide to the readers.

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